During recent years, information technology has finally conquered also the industrial production facilities. The need for updated and rapidly accessible information is important in almost every industrial process of today. In normal operation situations, such information is crucial to allow for an optimised operation in terms of economy, reliability, quality and/or safety. Production systems are available today, which allows the customers to place their orders including all customer-defined specifications directly via Internet. A central processor system will plan the manufacturing in an optimised manner and the customer is allowed to follow the scheduling and the manufacturing processes via Internet. Such systems are based on databases accessible for the central system, which include all necessary information for automatic processing of such orders.
By integrating systems in an industrial automation facility that deals with marketing, design, manufacturing, quality, transaction processing, distribution and similar processes, the efficiency for both the customers and the manufacturers increases. Such interaction of these processes, and the systems that guide them, through the exchange of dynamic, real-time information is what now is called Industrial IT. The large benefits are achieved by the possibility of e.g. using dynamic sets for production batches with parameters associated with real-time characteristics.
Other advantages with the extensive access to updated information come in the operation of industrial facilities. Service and maintenance operations can e.g. be scheduled for causing as small production losses as possible. Moreover, also the actual service operations are facilitated by the immediate access of detailed information. Operators or service personnel having user terminals connected to a central control and information system provides the operators or service personnel with all necessary status, technical and process parameters, as well as e.g. detailed instructions how to perform certain operations. By giving the central control system access to a huge amount of information related to the industrial facility and its components, the operators and service personnel have possibility to find any relevant information through their user terminals. The benefits of such systems are particular accentuated having movable user terminals, allowing the users to move within the facility. Such ideas are e.g. presented in “Industrial IT . . . The Next Way of Thinking” by L. Krantz in ABB Review 1/2000, pp. 4-10.
However, such extensive-information systems have also some drawbacks. The basic information is often stored in different kinds of databases. When the systems get large, there is a need for either a huge communication of information, distributed databases or local replica databases. Distributed or local databases have the inherent problem of keeping the databases updated in relation to the other databases in the system. Furthermore, communicating vast amounts of information to the different user terminals requires high transmission capacity, which may be difficult to achieve in a wireless manner, at least in an industrial environment having large noise and interference sources.
In a typical industrial automation facility, time is often of crucial importance. A stand-still of an automation line may cause huge costs. A cost for a stand-still of a production line of 5-50 US dollars per second is not at all unusual today. In the light of these costs, the mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) is an important factor when non-operational conditions are present. Using Industrial IT, the actual access to relevant information is assured. However, the amount of available data may sometimes be so large that just finding the right information takes a considerable time, time which costs a lot of money. Imagine a service technician having a user terminal in the vicinity of a machine indicating an operational error. A typical sequence of actions is to log in as a user, providing user name and maybe a password, waiting for the login procedures and then find the way through the extensive database objects to find the crucial information about the machine indicating a fault. In a typical case a lot of key-pressing or mouse-handling actions have to be performed before the important information is available at all. This is particular difficult in industrial environments, where operation of keys or mice typically is slow. Solutions based on voice control are not very probable due to high noise levels in industries. Furthermore, at every action, information has to be communicated back and forth between the main system and the user terminal, which both takes time and occupies communication resources. Everyone familiar with computers of today, knows that even a relatively short waiting time may be annoying, in particular when the situation is cost and time critical.